It is generally known as a best practice to have automated tests for your web application, which not always is an easy nor cost-affordable task. I have recently used BugBuster, a SaaS testing platform that makes the task easy by providing a solution that does exploratory testing in a smart way.

BugBuster‘s heuristic will crawl around your web application reporting JavaScript errors, missing resources and HTTP error messages; besides, unlike regular crawlers, it will try random combinations whenever it finds an action point: clickable buttons or links, text fields to fill, areas to scroll, and so forth. It is even able to test signup and confirmation emails, and integrates with common CI systems and bug tracking applications.

In this post I will show how easy it is to test a web application with BugBuster- whether in production, staging or development environments, it can also access your local and private environments thanks to a SSH tunnel. If you want to try it yourself, you can start by creating an account here if you haven’t already, and log in to the BugBuster application at app.bugbuster.com. To illustrate the example, I will test my own blog website.

Following the recent publication of the webwork.js library by @kolodny, I felt curious about the relative performance of web workers compared to regular sequential JavaScript. With this code snippet you can try by yourself – just inject the JS library in your web app:

Just after implementing the Twitter Oauth API to publish tweets from a PHP application, I thought that doing the same with Facebook would be a piece of cake. Well, not quite, although I’ve finally managed to have the messages published to a page wall, or even to an application’s page wall from an automated script. In this article I explain some of the problems I encountered and how to solved them. I hope this example may be of help if you are having trouble with this.

This is a small collection of Java classes to provide a simple profiling functionality: include it into your application to register the time consumption of your function calls. It may come in handy where a particularly slow module has been spotted and there is no need for a more complex profiling system

Besides of a time line of the application execution, it creates an histogram to present where your application spends more resources and what the most called functions are.

Configuring Lotus Domino WebDAV for third-party tools development has had us struggling a few days until we succeeded on make it actually work. There is a good article here that explains the basis of allowing WebDAV into your server.

However, that’s not all of it. The method above will never work unless you set the right permissions for the user ‘anonymous’ to the database you want to access. That’s it: individual database access must be configured, as it is explained here. The official reference can be also of help, although a bit outdated.

Even then, we had a lot of trouble working with the WebDAV enabled browsing. Under Windows 7 with Explorer, it seemed not allow any kind of file copying – but it allowed to create folders and files by right clicking directly on the directory, though. Also, we were having problems on MAC OS Finder in form of random write errors. All this stuff was pretty confusing and unclear on every forum and blog that we visited for help.